Why do you connect this with liberals??? If memory serves me correctly much of this stuff started with the 3 strikes rules in NY and Cali... and is essentially the genesis of zero tolerance...

Nelson Rockefeller started the whole three strikes rule a while ago, now for the unintended consequences... having to care for an aging prison population, complete with all their medical problems...

A lot of this stuff is written in haste and there is not much lee way for school administrators, not a lot of what if's...it seems to be a poorly written policy.. quite simply re-write the policy... but be aware of the unintended consequences.

Liberals=They know whats best for you, they are the truth and the way, they are so good, they love everybody, if you don't love them they will make you love them, come let us chase butterflys, if you were robbed in the park you shouldn't have been in the park you should be punished for making that poor criminal rob you.

tra la la twiddle dee dee "oh look Agatha an Eskimo lets have sex with him and buy him a new car, oh god we're so good"

If there's any doubt in anyone's mind as to who's fighting "Zero Tolerance" policies in the US school systems check out the hundreds of suits filed by The ACLU - an organization deemed entirely "leftist" by every right wing poster here.

I don't consider this a left versus right issue as much as I do a matter of being overly dedicated to equality versus having common sense.

The school board wants everyone to be treated equally so they institute a zero tolerance policy which comes down equally hard on everyone. I am sure we will all agree that treating everyone equally is a noble goal, but as we see in this example, it can result in throwing common sense out the window whereby a 6 year old with a swiss army knife gets treated the same as a 16 year old with a 12 inch blade.

Matthew Whalen, a senior at Lansingburgh Senior High School, says he follows the Boy Scout motto and is always prepared, stocking his car with a sleeping bag, water, a ready-to-eat meal â€” and the knife, which was given to him by his grandfather, a police chief in a nearby town.

But Lansingburgh High has a zero-tolerance policy, and when school officials discovered that Whalen kept his knife locked in his car, he says, they suspended him for five days â€” and then tacked on an additional 15 after a hearing.

I don't consider this a left versus right issue as much as I do a matter of being overly dedicated to equality versus having common sense.

The school board wants everyone to be treated equally so they institute a zero tolerance policy which comes down equally hard on everyone. I am sure we will all agree that treating everyone equally is a noble goal, but as we see in this example, it can result in throwing common sense out the window whereby a 6 year old with a swiss army knife gets treated the same as a 16 year old with a 12 inch blade.

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I don't think it has anything to do with treating people equally as a principle, I think it's nervous school boards that want to prevent something they are scared of by taking discretion away from teachers in an age when every parent seems willing to sue at the drop of a hat.

You see the same sentiment in mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines coming down from (usually right wing) legislators. The authoritarian mindset is that you need to have a comprehensive set of laws that cover every situation regardless of circumstance otherwise society is completely out of control. In the process you lose any ability to reason or use discretion.

Americans eat that "zero tolerance" BS up cuz they think it means they are taking a "tough" stand on crime and taking back their country from the namby pamby liberal judges and teachers that the media tells them are willing to let child molesters off the hook and kids bring drugs into schools.

The quickest way to get someone on your side is to strike fear into them by telling them that they are losing control. There's been a pretty steady ratcheting up of "tough on" this or that over the past 15 years and along the way the laws/rules get unsurprisingly less and less rational.

Tell a Mother or Father in bumfvck South Dakota that the school is taking a tough new stance on something to avoid another Columbine and they'll cheer you on for taking such a hardnosed stance until, of course, their kid gets in trouble for something frivolous and once again the parents would be happier to just leave it at the discretion of the teachers instead of fallin victim to some bureaucratic madness.

Michael Moore covered this only about 8 years ago when talking about the absurd reaction to Columbine where other schools suspended 7 year old kids for pretending a chicken finger was a gun among other ridiculous kneejerk responses. As usual everyone is about a decade behind him though, so it's nice to see some of the right leaning members on this board make the same point he did back then.

I don't think it has anything to do with treating people equally as a principle, I think it's nervous school boards that want to prevent something they are scared of by taking discretion away from teachers in an age when every parent seems willing to sue at the drop of a hat.

You see the same sentiment in mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines coming down from (usually right wing) legislators. The authoritarian mindset is that you need to have a comprehensive set of laws that cover every situation regardless of circumstance otherwise society is completely out of control. In the process you lose any ability to reason or use discretion.

Americans eat that "zero tolerance" BS up cuz they think it means they are taking a "tough" stand on crime and taking back their country from the namby pamby liberal judges and teachers that the media tells them are willing to let child molesters off the hook and kids bring drugs into schools.

The quickest way to get someone on your side is to strike fear into them by telling them that they are losing control. There's been a pretty steady ratcheting up of "tough on" this or that over the past 15 years and along the way the laws/rules get unsurprisingly less and less rational.

Tell a Mother or Father in bumfvck South Dakota that the school is taking a tough new stance on something to avoid another Columbine and they'll cheer you on for taking such a hardnosed stance until, of course, their kid gets in trouble for something frivolous and once again the parents would be happier to just leave it at the discretion of the teachers instead of fallin victim to some bureaucratic madness.

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I was just going to bring up the mandatory minimum thing, have often seen judges wrestle with this law... there have been countless misjustices due to this policy and one of the reasons our prisons are always so full.

Having had a son fall victim to a "zero tolerance" policy at his high school I can say on one hand it was so ludicrous as to be laughable - but on the other hand, it stays on their high-school transcript....and it doesn't necessarily spell out in detail what happened, only that something happened.

In his case not only was I, personally, fighting the school on it but the parents of the girl involved and the girl herself went to the principal and then to the school board in his behalf and they still refused to remove it from his permanent record.

He'd been horsing around in the hallway between classes with the other guys on the swim team - they'd just won a state meet the day before and they were celebrating.....two teammates had picked him up and were holding him on their shoulders - a teacher said "Get down" and they dropped him - in the course of dropping him, he was pitched into a girl walking down the hallway and he accidently brushed up against her while trying to regain his balance - the teacher saw it and immediately decided it was "sexual harrassment" because the school had a "zero touch" policy.

Everyone involved cried "no foul - no intent, no harm," but since "zero" means "no exceptions" the school suspended him for 5 days and put a sexual harrassment charge in his file.

Having had a son fall victim to a "zero tolerance" policy at his high school I can say on one hand it was so ludicrous as to be laughable - but on the other hand, it stays on their high-school transcript....and it doesn't necessarily spell out in detail what happened, only that something happened.

In his case not only was I, personally, fighting the school on it but the parents of the girl involved and the girl herself went to the principal and then to the school board in his behalf and they still refused to remove it from his permanent record.

He'd been horsing around in the hallway between classes with the other guys on the swim team - they'd just won a state meet the day before and they were celebrating.....two teammates had picked him up and were holding him on their shoulders - a teacher said "Get down" and they dropped him - in the course of dropping him, he was pitched into a girl walking down the hallway and he accidently brushed up against her while trying to regain his balance - the teacher saw it and immediately decided it was "sexual harrassment" because the school had a "zero touch" policy.

Everyone involved cried "foul - no intent, no harm," but since "zero" means "no exceptions" the school suspended him for 5 days and put a sexual harrassment charge in his file.

Morons.

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The silence from the right is deafening on this thread... what a bunch of dumbasses...

I don't consider this a left versus right issue as much as I do a matter of being overly dedicated to equality versus having common sense.

The school board wants everyone to be treated equally so they institute a zero tolerance policy which comes down equally hard on everyone. I am sure we will all agree that treating everyone equally is a noble goal, but as we see in this example, it can result in throwing common sense out the window whereby a 6 year old with a swiss army knife gets treated the same as a 16 year old with a 12 inch blade.

Click to expand...

I think and have thought that the zero tolerance policies are stupid for a whole host of reasons, especially since the punishment doesn't fit the non-crime...
Had the boy scout lied, " no sir I don't have a knife in my car" or denied them permission to search it " I left my keys at home" ( I know the car is there) he would have been scot-free. They are essentially punishing him for telling the truth...That's the message we want to send our kids.....NOT..
Why can't we get rid of these (as well as the mandatory minimums) and replace them with common sense? Back in the day, we'd keep aspirin and tylenol in our lockers and after a tough practice pop one or two. now that would get us suspended...Should a teenage girl get suspended for a Mydol?
A 6 year old for a boy scout instrument from his police chief grandfather? A boy scout suspended for being prepared and keeping supplies with a 2 inch blade in his car?? Of course not and we need to put common sense back into the equation.....We need to replace it with what lawyers call " the totality of the circumstances" I don't see it as a left-right thing but a way for schools to abdicate making decisions, deferring to a policy claiming they have no discretion. Maybe I'm old school and maybe the school see it as a way to coopt the inevitable lawsuits but who is hurt worse? It's the kid with the blemish on his record....

PS What do you want to bet that the kid who ratted out the Boy Scout with the 2 inch blade in his car is no boy scout himself and probably just wanted to cause trouble????

Point of information here, when this came down the righties had their depends in a bunch as it was no big deal, the school should be allowed to do it... it is ok to strip a girl down to her underwear in the search for Mydol... it was the atypical shyt storm, now they blame the left.... they felt is was perfectly ok to perform this on the girl, they went to great ends to show how stupid the scotus was on this decision.

When I was in High School one student bought a phony gun and 3 fake sticks of dynamite to school. They were props for some play he and others were working on. He was going to play the part of a terrorist. This would have been 1986, or '87.

He got a couple days worth of in-house suspension. He had to do his class work in a special study hall set aside for punishments each day rather than go to his actual classes. It was the school's standard, serious punishment. I did some time in that hall myself for fighting and cutting classes over the years.

Oh boy, did the teacher supervising the play catch some serious hell though. He permitted the kids to plan a play involving terrorism. Something like what the student did was exceptionally predictable. As I understand it the incident didn't appear on his permanent record, but it sure showed up on the teacher's.